Great article! For me, a good tool for has always been Stephen Covey's time management "grid." There are four quadrants:

1. Urgent and important (top left)
2. Not urgent, but important (top right)
3. Urgent, but not Important (bottom left)
4. Not urgent nor important (bottom right)

If you plan each day/week/month/year with your tasks categorized into this grid and focus most of your time on quadrant 2 (i.e. not urgent, but important), you'll find your business moves forward at steady, healthy and predictable rate.

For what it's worth, the best change I've made to my home office is not working there. Housework, my guitar, internet TV, and devastating loneliness just made it impractical five days a week. There are a number of "co-working" spaces available in Seattle that make a great escape 2-3 days a week - including http://www.officenomads.com (my preference) and http://www.mydayoffice.com.

Brilliantly helpful and concise article. I'm going to use this information to publish a press release next week. Thank you!

Have you tried 37 Signal's Highrise for contact management? Works great for me.